Hey how are you doing?
I'm a computer technician and I feel sorry for you buddy. You tried to do the old Dual boot trick and it stuffed your mbr eh
Personally what I would do in this situation is create a very small primary partition at the end of your drive (you know how to do that). You should make it FAT and at least 2MB. Create a Bootable CD that can get into DOS prompt and copy a boot loader called XOSL
http://www.ranish.com/part/ into that partition. You will probably want to use a windows 98 boot disk or a dos boot disc, which might be hard to find but i'm sure you're smart enough. Once you have copied the XOSL folder into the partition, run it and install it to that partition. You now have a boot loader which allows you to choose which partition you want to
set active.
In my opinion it's better to set the partition active to install and boot multiple Operating Sysytems that way, rather than compiling the windows boot.ini to multi-boot your PC.
After you have done this your computer may or may not work. You will get a little boot loader start up and you can choose to boot off primary partitions so you can setup partition for windows xp and partition for windows vista.
If you get this far and everythings working then you can wipe the end FAT partition of your harddrive, since the bootloader is your mbr and doesn't actually sit on the end of your harddrive, however you
should create a backup of your mbr by using a DOS based tool such as mbrrest and a windows based one as well (they both can load and restore mbr files no matter what extension it has).
If you get this far and windows xp doesn't boot even though you configured it in XOSL then you will need to rebuild your mbr by using a tool such as partition doctor. You can then try XOSL again and if windows xp now loads, but vista doesn't load then you will need to do these steps 1)Set the primary partion you are installing vista to as active 2)install vista onto the partition now that its active 3)Install XOSL again
Just a small note about active partitions - There can only be one active partition at one time, if you look in partition magic you will see which partition is active. If you see that your vista partition is active, then that is a good sign, if windows xp is still active then you are going to have a few problems and need to follow the lengthy process I wrote. The active partition is where your operating system will load from and it will also show up as C: which is what you said. Thats why I suspect you are in luck, but you should check the settings in partition magic and if it is active then get XOSL now and it will work fine.
just make sure you save your mbr before installing XOSL since it will overwrite your current one, just incase it doesnt work!
